Fantasy is often beloved and belittled. “Are you still reading Harry Potter? How’s the new Runescape?” But beneath the fluff, a morbid truth is laid bare. Because this genre is not a codified set of ideals, such as horror or romance, but instead consists of a loose weave of ideas and tropes based on the European Middle Ages, Fantasy can’t help but incorporate the ruling ideologies of the medieval period, or its source material, so to speak. Popular media where this issue becomes the most glaring are Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons and of course Lord of the Rings, the quasi-progenitor of the genre in its modern form. Obvious examples include Orcs being coded as oriental “others” and deities mostly taking the shape of white men, but where do we find the more subtle jabs? Where does colonial other-coding turn into the white man’s plot armor? And where does Catholicism slot in?
What are these Colonial Biases?
Colonization is the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the Indigenous people of an area. In almost all cases of colonization, subjects from subjugated territories have always been othered or attributed certain characteristics to make them appear less than human, in order to justify their mistreatment. This imbalance of attributed value served to alleviate the cognitive dissonance of oppressing another equal, by reassigning the responsibility for colonization to a divine mission that needs to be fulfilled or a world order that needs to be upheld. Eventually, this cognitive reflex leads to a solidified ideology that categorizes humans based on physiological traits and origins, like gender and ethnicity, which leads to institutionalized discrimination and eugenics, among others.
This ideology commonly places the white man at the top of the tier list, and through the years, while its hold on the institutions of the world gradually disintegrated, it remained firmly in the minds of those who didn’t think about it too much. According to this logic, it makes sense that the white coworker got a promotion, and this immigrant who was arrested the other day probably committed the crime. But if the roles were reversed, the world would be turned on its head. This is what’s called Colonial Bias, and only few people who are alive today can be faulted for it really. Psychologically speaking, it is a way of understanding the world, a method for easing the cognitive load of differentiated thinking, based on one of the most human traits ever: categorizing.
Categorizing is the thing humans do best, and it’s one of the key factors behind world domination. A brain is a big evolutionary investment; it needs a lot of fuel. Every thought is costly, and neural efficiency is key to survival, so instead of trying to comprehend every object like a pear in its entirety, human brains are wired to assign them to categories and boxes, tagged with key features. A pear grows on a tree and it is sweet so it counts as a fruit, together with the oranges and strawberries of this world. Not everyone needs to know the exact way a pear develops or why it’s shaped a certain way, but everyone needs to know its key characteristics, and the same is true for everything else around us. We understand our environs as a swirl of tag lines that assemble and disperse to form emergent ideas, based on the properties of something – or someone. Colonial Biases are one outcome of understanding the world based on this principle. The same way fruits are assigned properties, humans can as well especially in Fantasy media.
In the Beginning, there was Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, as a product of Tolkien and part of his Legendarium, is suffused with the same vaguely off-putting air, that pervades most media from the time of its writing. Conceived as a sequel to finish the story of Bilbo Baggins and tell the tale of his nephew Frodo Baggins, the saga toys enough with stereotypes to raise an eyebrow, but never too much as to make it two. Tolkien himself was anti-racist during both World Wars and opposed apartheid and racism in South Afric. Yet, given the conservative and Catholic worldview Middle-earth sprang to life from, it’s impossible to ignore the racist connotations and footnotes his shapings are addled with, exemplified by the implicit hierarchy between Elves, Dwarves, Humans, Hobbits and Orcs. This is made more glaring by a 1958 private letters where he described the physical appearance of the Orcs as:
“squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”
– To Forrest J. Ackerman, June 1958
Tolkien’s Orcs are based on the concept of an expendable evil creature, that embodies everything deemed wrong in Catholic cosmology. They are molded from the earth, can only survive at night and are inherently evil, which isn’t wrong – yet. Where it gets dicey is their racial connotation, which mimics the paranoid caricature a European writer sketches up about peoples he has only heard of in tall tales from the far east.
Dwarves on the other hand are clear caricatures of Jewish people, both through stereotypical features like big noses, beards, and stocky builds, and prejudice on culture, such as their language (which seems directly based on Hebrew), their tendency to hoard gold and their longing for a distinct homeland, which coincides with Zionism.
The Elves are an embodiment of divine will and the good in the world, something along the lines of angels, holding divine powers they guard with secrecy and sometimes helping out the struggling mortals of the world. They are coded as white Caucasian people who hail from a land beyond the ocean, where they must inevitably return to, which brings along another angle to Tolkien’s problematic cosmology, Middle-Earth’s moral geography. All good things come from the West, and evil broods in the East. The North is simple and the south is decadent. It almost feels like a satirical take on the political compass, but in fact most places in his writing fit this logic in one way or another, adding another theme that is prevalent throughout much of fiction until the current day. Even though the racism inherent to his worldbuilding was probably not intentional, it irrevocably shaped Fantasy media forever.
Kingdoms in Basements
When the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out, Tolkien’s influence wasn’t just felt, it was like a fist on your cheekbone. The very first official story module for the game was called Keep on the Borderlands, and the plot was about colonizing a region by enslaving and murdering the natives. Thanks to its immense popularity, the game has been around for more than fifty years now and through the stages of its various editions, has softened on its inherent Colonial Bias and the stereotypes it perpetuated.
With the release of the game’s fifth edition in 2014, sales and player numbers skyrocketed, and through that new visibility, a lot of racist or problematic mechanics and allusions were pointed out, which perfectly make sense in the worldview of classical fantasy, but are nothing more than remnants of a colonial mindset.
The most glaring are Races, which have now been renamed to Species, which is more fitting but still feels a bit off. In this table-top role-playing game, beloved by theater kids and power gamers alike, you create a fantastical character who goes on adventures and for the creation of one such character, you need to decide on a Species, such as dwarf, orc or elf and a class, such as Fighter, Wizard or Rogue.
Every species has specific traits that only they can get and in fifth edition, every species got specific increases to their Ability Scores, that determine things like Strength or Intelligence of the character, which is already problematic in itself. On the one hand, it pigeonholes certain species into certain classes, by forcing them to allocate resources to abilities they won’t use anyway. A good example is the Dwarf Warlock, who uses the Charisma stat to determine the power of his spells, but only gains a boost to Intelligence or Wisdom, essentially meaning you can make a Charismatic Dwarf, but should you? Why not make a Cleric or a Barbarian instead? Why not play a Human instead? They get a boost to every single stat, so they can play every single class because they are the most versatile of them all. Does it sound racist yet? Luckily Humans were never any good in fifth edition to begin with.
It gets even worse with the Half-Races, the Half-Elf and the Half-Orc. The Half-Elf is broken; it gets the most stat boosts of any race and is frequently outlawed at tables. One reason why they could be so powerful is because Half-Elves represent the mix of fantasy’s darlings, the central-European and the Elf, thus justifying the Half-Elf’s above-average power level. The Half-Orc on the other hand is mechanically sound, but its moral implications mirror those of the other Half-Race, basically denoting Orcs as so terribly subhuman, that they can only be part of the player experience if they are mixed with humans, to reduce their primal aggression. This is Colonial Bias at its finest, because Orcs and Elves are not just monsters and angels, they are coded after real people and thus become stand-ins for groups the game designers may or may not like.
In its latest edition, D&D 5.5e, most of these problematic angles have been sorted out. Where the players once got to choose which flavor of central-European man they wanted to play in a campaign against anybody who looked vaguely different and darker skinned than them, the game now accommodates for all types of players to create characters they can identify with. Monstrous species have been replaced with evil vocations, and built-in buffs don’t come along with your Species anymore, but with your background instead. Now you don’t need to be Finnish to be a hockey player, and vice versa, can finally make a seductive Dwarf.
Savages and Normal People
World of Warcraft has been around since 2004 and morally it’s barely moved. After starting the game, you are presented with a character creation screen, where you are prompted to select a character class, like warrior, hunter or mage, from an array of classic fantasy tropes. You are, however, also required to select a race and these are split between two factions, the Horde and the Alliance. This is where it gets problematic. The Horde presents you with a total of six unique races, excluding allied races. These are Orcs, Tauren, Trolls, Undead, Blood Elves and Goblins. The alliance on the other hand musters Humans, Gnomes, Dwarves, Night Elves, Draenei and Worgen. Most of these terms are self-explanatory, while some are more cryptic. As a rule of thumb, the Horde represents the power of nature and cooperation for survival, while the Alliance represents adherence to moral order and cooperation for maintenance of society. Does it sound dicey yet?
All of the Horde’s member factions/races are characterized by being outcasts and down on their luck, which often comes with problematic ethnic connotations. Orcs are modeled after Tolkien’s vaguely Mongol/Asian stereotypes, the Minotaurs called Tauren stand in for native North American civilizations, while superstitious Trolls represent Jamaican and Haitian culture. The Undead and Blood Elves don’t seem too problematic at first, but a closer look reveals that they are merely corrupted derivatives of two of the Alliance’s “good” member factions, the Humans and the High Elves. And lastly there’s the Goblins, who are a wild card, because they blend Tolkien’s dwarves and their allusions to Jewish identity with aspects from Italian immigrant communities in America, they are basically opportunistic New Yorkers who got lumped in with POC.
The Alliance member factions are always denoted by a need to defend themselves against foreign intruders, which leads to ethnic connotations as well. Humans are classic central-Europeans, Dwarves are Scottish miners, Gnomes are Irish tinkerers, Night Elves are Welsh druids, the Draenei represent orthodox Christians and Werewolves called Worgen are gothic Englishmen.
With the awareness of these connotations, it becomes very easy to guess, which faction appeals more to impressionable teens, and if you guessed the Alliance, you are correct. The entire game is built on this conflict between two teams which gave it a massive pull, just by dividing its own player base. In the early days of WoW, everything seemed more or less morally balanced, but over time, the Horde turned into the Alliance’s punching bag and only served as a pedestal for their meaningless trophies. This leads to a more severe and modern retwisting of Colonial Bias, political instability.
In the history of WoW, the Horde has seen two rulers become genocidal warmongers, a siege of their capital and the deaths of three factions leaders, while the Alliance lost only one faction leader in a highly climactic and over-dramatized fashion. This is not just fantasy worldbuilding, this emphasizes the instability of nascent nations and political entities after the end of foreign rule. World of Warcraft holds a lot of colonial baggage, since it is made by and for a predominantly white male western audience, which consciously or not, often maintains and acts on Colonial Biases.
Swords and Sorcery, Castles and Colonies
Throughout its history, Fantasy media has always been riddled with Colonial baggage, be it Tolkien’s Moral Geography, Racial features in Dungeons and Dragons or political narratives in World of Warcraft.
As time goes on and these products try to appeal to a broader audience, it becomes unfashionable and uneconomic to continuously perpetuate these ideals, in the eyes of their creators, but that doesn’t mean they are gone forever.
It is important to continuously deconstruct these ancient tropes and stereotypes to keep media appealing and accessible to all, and to avoid boxing people into self-fulfilling prophecies perpetuated by the legacy of Colonialism, like the notion that dwarves can’t be seductive. Finally, the world won’t change tomorrow, but awareness of the media we enjoy and create can perhaps one day lead to a better world.
And trust me, I NEVER played a human character in any of these games.
Domenic Schwander
Sources :
- Wikipedia/Tolkien and Race
- The truth about colonialism in D&D
- The Lord of the Rings – J.R. Tolkien
- Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook (2014)
- Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual (2014)
- Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook (2024)
- Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual (2024)
- World of Warcraft
- Warcraft I Remastered
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